QUOTENIK is a growing library of verified quotes, launched in June 2010 by me, Sara Bader. I am a writer, archival researcher, and editor. I first fell in love with quotes when I researched the national bestseller The Atheist’s Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts (ECCO/HarperCollins, 2007) for the late Joan Konner, former dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. I haven’t stopped collecting quotes ever since. When I’m not writing, researching, and editing books, I’m reading letter collections, diaries, memoirs, speeches, interviews, and other on- and offline sources, flagging quotations to add to this archive or to share in published collections.
        My first book, Strange Red Cow & Other Curious Classified Ads from the Past (Clarkson Potter, 2005), uses newspapers classified ads published over the last three centuries as an unexpected porthole into US history. I also coauthored Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Guide to Recovery with Neil Steinberg, published by the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2016. More recently, I launched a quotation collection series for Phaidon: I conceived, researched, and edited Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists, Every Day a Word Surprises Me & Other Quotes by Writers, and You Had Better Make Some Noise: Words to Change the World.
        The right quote—read or heard at the right time—can confirm and reinforce what we already feel or know. It can also be an agent of change. A well-framed thought articulated by someone else can reshape our perspective, even influence the choices we make. With his book Food Rules, a pocket-sized guide to healthy eating, Michael Pollan hopes that a few of the rules “will prove sufficiently sticky, or memorable, that they will become second nature” to the reader. QUOTENIK’s hope is similar, that the observations collected here will somehow come in handy as we navigate our daily lives.

QUOTENIK’s mission:

→ To preserve the integrity of quotes by confirming their accuracy. (“Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation,” wrote Louis Menand in The New Yorker.) Every entry added to this collection—whether published hundreds of years ago or today—is verified and properly sourced.

→ To gather and expand the inventory of quotable thoughts in our conversations and cultural consciousness so we have fresh material to consider and share. On QUOTENIK you can find, confirm, research, and enjoy the words others have written or spoken — from Homer to Homer Simpson.



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